Richard Wallis wrote:
>
> Coming from Talis you would expect me to say, but I make no excuses for
> it, that the bibliographic world needs to provide its services via a
> Platform within which is hidden all the complexities that should be of
> no interest to the consumers of our services. In that way 'Library'
> will get built in to the rest of the information environment; if not,
> libraries will remain the domain of the 'specialist' internet user.
>
Right. But things will have to be done, in more than a few places,
operating from a MARC21 environment. There's too much that depends on it.
Names could of course be encoded in a better way. UKMARC did so but
was scrapped some years ago, in favor of you guess what. That was due to
the marketing power of MARC21, not its versatility or quality as a
metadata language.
Don't OPACS increasingly have an Endnote download option, even if they
are MARC-based? Are there complaints about poor quality there?
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Jan 17 2007 - 10:53:47 EST